Roaring Snow As Sand: Author's Commentary

[ainbthech]

A friend of mine did a fanvid and then wrote up this giant "Director's Commentary" thing for it that I enjoyed a whole lot, and so I decided I would try that for this story, which aaaaaaaaaaaate my braaaaaaaaaaaaaain. So if you're bored or secretly care about what goes on inside my pseudonymous head or whatever, you can enjoy reading this! I had fun writing it, which is arguably the main point.

GENERAL:

• I really really really really like what kitsuneasika  did in the original story she [0] wrote for me as part of the pokeprompts  holiday exchange. It did a lot of things well, but the ones that grabbed my attention the most were the way it meandered across time, speeding up and slowing down where it needed to and felt like, and the way Silver was characterized --- at first the story worked primarily with my understanding of SIlver from the games and from sort of my ambient knowledge of the character on the Internet, and over time I started to see the specific Silver that she imagined. I really like him! I tried to do the same for Kotone here.
• I wrote this across like two months, and then had to get it finished for a deadline, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were consistency issues that I didn't catch; I purposely had some Pokemon gendered and some not gendered, but didn't choose which were which for a while, and some of those could be flubbed; I also had a difficult time lining up the timings with the original stories, making sure the right pokemon was sending letters at the right time, and so on.
• Because the original story was so broad --- it spans almost four years --- I could really write whatever I wanted. In some ways this freed me to write about whatever I wanted and that was really cool; in other ways it was tricky and I think I sort of went off the rails a bit in a couple of places. It also meant that, had I written as much as I wanted to, it would have been like 15000 words; I had a pretty detailed outline worked out for the whole Farfetch'd arc and just couldn't get it to do what I wanted, so I cut it three days before deadline so that I could actually, you know, write the ending. Maybe I will get to it another time?
• The HTML is automatically generated; I write in LaTeX and if you know what that is and also read Pokemon fanfiction please be my friend. It seems to have worked OK although getting it into LJ was irritating.
• I had a lot of fun writing this, and I totally left myself room to build off of it. I think I might be developing a Cynthia thing. This cannot be bad.
• I think of the Champion as being required to accept challenges, much like a gym leader, but wiht a litle more flexibility? So I fudged it a little bit and had Kotone in kind of quasi-retirement as a Champion Emeritus or something. This probably doesn't matter at all to the story.

BEGINNING:

• I started with the letter here to sort of set the whole travel motif, and do some characterization; in particular I wanted Pidgeot to be extremely displeased with this whole process and to have that be a Thing.
• Farfetch'd from nowhere! Can we pretend that there was a Farfetch'd episode but it wasn't shown because it triggered seizures or something? :)
• Of course Silver's voicemail is snarky! One of the tricky things I had there was that the original story has no use of phones, even though there are a bunch of phones --- and even video phones --- in the Pokemon universe in various places. I really liked that for what it did to the story, but it was a little tough when so many of my plot points ended in "...but wouldn't they just call each other on the phone?" (I have long-distance relationships and writing this was terrifying, because I don't know what I would do without Skype! Kotone and Silver have such patience.)

SINNOH:

• I'm happy with the whole "losing him" transition, not least because it saved me from a part of my outline (meeting Cynthia for the first time) that I was having a ton of trouble writing. :) 
• Volkner! Because everything is better with an emo engineer. <3
• What's that? Volkner and Flint broke up? BUT THE FANGIRLSSSSSSS (you can pretend he's talking about someone else if you want)
• When I wrote this first scene in the cafe, I couldn't decide what was going to happen with Cynthia and Kotone. I think, not that I'm not biased, that it actually helps.
• I'm so down on Dawn in this story! Which is weird because I really like Dawn, she's one of my favorite characters, but I needed a foil.
• WEIRD PLATONIC KOTONE/CYNTHIA CUDDLE THING. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
• I love how Cynthia out-confidences Kotone such that Kotone actually opens up and expresses vulnerability around her, in a way I don't think of her as doing even around Silver. You get to share yourself in different ways with people! Negotiated non-monogamy is great! Part of my reasoning for not having Kotone actually sleep with anyone --- aside from wanting to keep the story at least arguably PG-13 --- is that I see her as not having really negotiated what Silver was comfortable with her doing, and even though he says "whatever" she's too worried to actually do whatever.

HOENN:

• I had to do something to make it clear that Dawn isn't vapid! I mean, come on, she can out-battle Cynthia! 
• And here's one of the places where the arbitrary time-dilation doesn't work as well; out of nowhere there's a Swellow! Look, it furthers the plot! :/
• I almost said "wants to kiss him again before his hair turns his name" but I thought it would be confusing...

SINJOH:

• Yes I totally based this arc on a special event from HGSS. I really liked that event, OK??
• I just feel so weird having Arceus, who is basically this universe's God, stored in my PC box. Next to another Arceus! And so I wanted to write something that had the characters in-universe grapple with these questions.
• Is it too obvious or not obvious enough who the hiker is?
• Why isn't Dawn willing to talk about what she was sick with? Because I don't know! [1]
• It's probably obvious that there is some deadline crunchiness here, although I really like a lot of the throwaway lines in here; I felt like now that the characters were comfortable with each other, they could be a little wittier. Some of the emtional nuance from the earlier sections is gone, though, because all of the sudden the epic level is kind of cranked up. Something to try to write in the future: A cranked epic level that doesn't displace the emotional content.
• Are Dawn and Cynthia sleeping together??? (Yes.) It's awkward because I think of Dawn as like 19 and Kotone as mid-twenties and Cynthia as, like, 33ish. 25/33 is nothing. But Dawn's awfully young. It's not really in the story at all, in part because I just didn't want to worry about it. My initial outline called for them to develop their own relationship that kind of paralled Silver and Kotone but that was another thing that got cut.
• ARCEUS EVENT!

TINY INTERLUDE:

• People online who do trading are always cloning Pokemon. Why wouldn't someone try to do that in the in-game universe? If pokemon are transmitted digitally as information, that means they can be copied; no one in this universe seems to be worried about encryption, could you really just tap the wire and get Arceus out? If so... prepare for trouble!

ENDING:

• There was no need to drag this out. There's so much for them to talk about, but it's not in the original story, and I wanted to end in the same place the original story does. There's so much room to build off of this! I might do so! 

[0] I'm like 99.9% sure that's kitsuneasika 's preferred pronoun.

[1] Although I was thinking of leukemia; I had a friend in high school who came down with it, everyone thought he was cured, and then four or five years later he basically went from perfectly fine to dead in less than a week. :/ It was really sad. Luckily in my pokemon fanfiction rather than making that happen to my characters I can have Arceus intervene!